Polls Fail Again! Theresa May Disappointed

Once again, a politician relies on polls and the polls fail her. Theresa May imagined that she would gain from the U.K.’s Parliamentary general election. But she was wrong, partially because of the recurring problem that polls fail to predict voter behavior. Despite the happy result of the Brexit vote, a generation of socialist brainwashing has consequences.

After most polls failed to predict the winner in Thursday’s British Parliamentary election, the latest in a series of polling misfires, one consensus emerged: The polls stink.

Pre-election surveys also failed to predict the outcomes of the 2015 Parliamentary general election, the 2016 Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

After the earlier misses, and eager to avert repeats, polling associations in both countries organized inquiries to investigate, and correct, the causes of the failures. But the Thursday’s British results weren’t reassuring.

Leading up to the election, polls put the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Theresa May ahead of the main opposition Labour Party by 1 to 12 percentage points.

But British voters turned against the prime minister, leaving her short of the 326 seats needed to win a majority of Britain’s 650-seat Parliament.

“The irony is that pollsters were all midstream in making changes when Theresa May called the election,” said Jon Cohen, chief research officer for SurveyMonkey, which conducts online polls in the U.S. and U.K.

Polls can be bedeviled by low response rates, samples that are too small or respondents whose demographics don’t match those of voters. To examine their practices, the U.S. and U.K. each assigned a task force.

About the author

Joe Scudder

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.